Major changes occurring in the world are redefining the metrics of excellence for higher education.

Globalization and Internationalization

Samuel Palmisano, Chair of the Board and CEO of IBM, provides an interesting and concise perspective of what globalization means in the corporate world in an article, The Globally Integrated Enterprise, that appeared in the May/June 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs. In this article, he outlined the evolution of corporations into global entities, and contrasted the newer, globally integrated corporation with earlier international and multinational corporations. It is interesting to use his framework to look at internationalization activities in university higher education.

Palmisano writes that the international corporation began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century. This was a simple hub-and-spoke network that focused on home country manufacture with international distribution, and in many cases international supply of raw materials. The rise of protectionism in the 1920's and 1930's made the “spokes” ineffective, and companies had to move from home country manufacture with international distribution to local production in desirable markets. Certain functions such as R&D and product design remained centralized, however.

The decades at the end of the 20th century saw a liberalization of trade and investment flows as national barriers weakened and sometimes collapsed. Information technology made communication fast and cheap. The result was to change the focus of corporations from products to production. It enabled “the integration of production and value delivery worldwide.”“Global”thus implies a world that is sufficiently open and unhindered by state barriers that a global (in every sense of the word) optimization of production and distribution can become the goal.

Many of the traditional and more recent higher education internationalization activities do basically follow a hub and spoke model. For example, focused recruitment efforts to “import” international students to the home campus, establishment of branch programs in other countries through a variety of approaches and utilization of distance learning in order to “export” home campus programs to international students in place. There are some areas of the world in which foreign higher education establishments are not allowed to confer degrees, and in those cases the required partnerships with local institutions necessary to create local production reflect a situation quite parallel to that which led to the multinational corporation. On the other hand, at the research level, many of our faculty as individuals are “globally integrated”, seeking out the best collaborators worldwide in order to optimize the production, funding, and distribution of their research. Thus, 150 years of corporate evolution can be found alive and active in today’s higher education.

Palmisano’s description of global integration follows that of many
others, and emphasizes the centrality of modularization in enabling the
process (see, for example, Berger's work described in The many pathways to globalization, April 21, 2006, or that of Hagel and Brown, described in What has offshoring got to do with research universities?, Feb. 22, 2006). One can get the modules produced in many ways, in many places, which opens up broad options for optimization of the production process.

What can we identify as the modules of university higher education? How might looking at these modules, and ways that they might be produced,lead to a more globalized vision of higher education? I will consider some possible answers to these questions in a series of posts to follow. The first of these is Modularity in university higher education, June 16, 2006.

My largest frustration with globalization is being pushed into the service industry doing low scale dead end jobs. And my computer science degree was a waste of effort as well as bad baggage. I have learned to never mention it when I look for positions anymore either. If I had known that I was going to be competing with over 1 billion people that make less than a dollar a day I would have never bothered going to college, or would have chosen a field that I had bit more talent in. The lesson I learned is that after high school it would have been far more realistic going for a blue collar union job, like plumbing.

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